Preview Look of Expo ’67

In about one month Expo 67 will open in Canada on Montreal’s Ile Sainte-Helene. It will last until October 27, with April 28^th as the opening day. One expects 35 million visitors during this half year of “Happenings” on a grand scale. The Montreal Gazette writes that Expo 67’s network of canals will be filled with water from the River St. Lawrence, which will be tinted blue.

It will be, so they say, the exhibition of exhibitions, as sensational and new and important as was the World’s Exhibition in London, 1851, with the Crystal Palace, and the one in Paris with the Eifel Tower as a landmark for the Fair in 1889.

Expo 67 has the idea to show how man’s environment effects him, how man changes and improves his environment to achieve his aspirations and how man is affected by his new environment. Five themes are used by the international buildings: “Man the Creator, Man in the Community, Man the Explorer, Man the Producer, and Man the Provider.”

As soon as one enters the Expo’s grounds, the architecture is the one of the future.

Outstanding at the first glance is the big prismatic shimmering Sphere of the United States Pavilion, designed by Buckminster Fuller and the “Cambridge Eight” group. This structure looms gigantically to a height of 250 feet, it is faced in the distance by the pavilion of the Soviet Union with a soaring rectangular sweeping roof of 138 feet, the building covers 140,000 square feet, equal to six football fields.

But the “star” of the international buildings (I counted 38) is HABITAT ’67, a radically new concept of urban dwelling, designed by the Israeli born Moshe Safdie, living in Montreal.

Habitat looks like a small southern Italian city (Positano) and consists of houses stacked one atop the other, made from square blocks of concrete, modular concrete blocks, staggered terraces with roofs which provide gardens.

One thinks also about cave dwellings of Spain, very primitive looking, but the inside of this costly dwelling (they sell from $40,000 to $100,000) are not primitive at all. They provide privacy, comfort, three to four bedrooms, gardens, bathrooms made from plastic, all white,they are decorated by Montreal’s best artists and will be, so it seems, the very new sensation of housing of the future.

The individual box-houses weigh 70–90 tons, the whole complex of the box-structure measures 950 ft. in length, 300 ft. in width, and 120 feet in height.

The amusement area “La Ronde,” is meant to be the section where everybody will have fun. It will be a mixture between Copenhagen’s Tivoli and California’s Disneyland. Its most modern feature with space-age excitement is the “space ride” in the GYROTRON. Its construction is costing 3 million dollars.

In the space ride, one is shot up 165 feet in a capsule, simulating a trip into space, and is thrown down in a kind of lava filled volcano, where a monster shoots out swallowing the space traveler up. It lasts all together 6-1/2 minutes and will cost $1.

To describe in detail all the many pavilions and sites provided to receive 165,000 visitors a day would take too much room here. But a trip to Montreal this spring, summer or early fall will be worth it.

Rooms in private houses are provided “en masse” for reasonable prices, government controlled.

Besides, all the most modern inventions of science and the visual arts, there will be a Festival of the Performing Arts, with eight operas, eleven ballets, 20 symphonies, 25,000 artists are expected, and so-called troubadours act as free entertainers between the plazas and pavilions if anyone should get bored.

Detroiters should take advantage of Montreal’s hospitality. If Windsor or Toronto is as far Canadian as you’ve been, then make a point to see EXPO 67.